Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (19 page)

St Columba’s was, arguably, the most famous and influential monastery in the whole of Britain and Ireland. Born in 521, its founder Columba was an energetic, powerfully-built, hot-tempered Irishman from a noble family from Ulster. Joining the church at an early age, Columba soon earned a reputation for piety and learning. However, his temper almost destroyed his career. In 561 a dispute over a sacred manuscript that Columba had illicitly copied escalated out of control, leading to a battle in which a great many people were killed. A synod called to judge Columba considered excommunicating him but in the end sentenced him to exile. In 563 Columba left Ireland and sailed to Scotland with twelve companions, resolving to atone for his errors by winning as many souls for Christ as had been lost in the battle. Columba was welcomed by his kinsman King Conall of Dál Riata, who gave him Iona as a base from which to evangelise the pagan northern Picts. As well as piety, Conall probably had some very worldly motives. In medieval Europe, political power often followed the church. Bringing the Picts under the influence of the Irish church could open the way to bring it under the political influence of Dál Riata.

Columba’s voyage to Scotland was an expression of one of the most important traditions of the Celtic church,
peregrinatio
, a penitential journey in which the monks placed their fate into the hands of God. Irish monks became skilled seafarers, usually sailing in
curachs
, small but seaworthy sailing boats made of greased leather stretched over a wicker frame. Using these boats, Irish monks searched for ultimate solitude to contemplate the glories of God, founding spartan monasteries – often no more than a few dry-stone ‘beehive’ huts – on remote islands all along the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Some went further, discovering the Faeroe Islands and Iceland some 200 years before the Vikings. The Vikings often encountered Irish monks (and not usually to the monks’ advantage) during their voyages and place-names derived from
papar
, as the Vikings called them, are widespread in the Hebrides, Northern Isles and even Iceland. The largest group of
papar
place-names are islands. Four islands in the Outer Hebrides are called Pabbay (from
papar
and ø), meaning ‘island of the papar’, as is another off the Isle of Skye. There are also islands named for the
papar
in the Orkney and Shetland Islands and off Iceland.

Like Lindisfarne, Iona seems a remote place today, but the sea lanes were the main roads of the early Middle Ages and seen from this point of view it was an excellent choice for an active evangelist like Columba. Ireland lay only 70 miles away to the south, an easy day’s sail in fair weather. Even more important for Columba’s ambitions, Iona was within easy reach of the Great Glen, the main west–east overland route through the northern Highlands, which led directly to the main power centres of the northern Picts around the Moray Firth. In modern terms, Iona was about as inaccessible as a shopping mall at a motorway intersection. The narrow sound that separates Iona from the much larger neighbouring island of Mull provided sheltered anchorages and landing places, which the Vikings no doubt also appreciated. Though mostly covered with rock, heather moor and bog, Iona has large areas of fertile
machair
, pasture formed on raised beaches with light soils of lime-rich shell-sand, so the community could be self-supporting.

Columba’s personality made him a force to be reckoned with and by the time of his death in 597 his abbey was the dominant church not only of Dal Riata and Pictland but also of much of northern Ireland, where even bishops were subordinated to his authority. Columba’s death only enhanced Iona’s influence by making it a place of pilgrimage. When King Oswald of Northumbria wanted to make his kingdom Christian, it was to Iona, rather than Rome, that he turned to ask for missionaries. The abbot sent Aidan, the founder of St Cuthbert’s monastery on Lindisfarne. Iona became a centre for crafts, including glass, metalwork, sculpture and book production. The
Book
of
Kells
, one of the finest illuminated gospel books of the early Middle Ages, was made at Iona. Iona’s greatest treasure was, however, the magnificent jewelled reliquary that held Columba’s remains, the priceless source of the monastery’s power.

Martyred by the Vikings

After the second raid on Iona, abbot Cellach bought land at Kells, well inland in Ireland, for use as a refuge for the monks in the event of further attacks. After the massacre in 806, Cellach left to oversee the construction of a new monastery on the land the community had bought at Kells. When work was completed in 814, most of the community moved to Kells, which became the seat of the abbot. Iona was not abandoned completely, however. Cellach resigned his abbacy and returned to Iona with a small group of monks who were willing to accept the risk of death at pagan hands: Irish monks saw their calling as a manly one, requiring courage and fortitude. The all-important relics of St Columba also stayed on Iona. In 824 an Irish monk called Blathmac became head of the community on Iona. Blathmac was not afraid of the Vikings. His biographer, a German monk called Walafrid Strabo (d. 849), says that he was actively seeking martyrdom at pagan hands because he ‘wished to endure Christ’s wounds’. Blathmac did not have to wait long to achieve his ambition: the Vikings returned to Iona in 825. When warning of Viking raiders reached the abbey, Blathmac allowed those monks who did not think they could endure martyrdom to leave: he remained with a hardcore of willing martyrs. The raiders arrived while Blathmac was celebrating morning mass. Bursting into the church, the Vikings immediately killed Blathmac’s companions. The Vikings were after the precious reliquary that contained Columba’s relics, but the monks had removed it from its pedestal in the church and hidden it under a stack of peat. No amount of torture could persuade Blathmac to reveal its hiding place and in the end the enraged Vikings hacked him to pieces and left empty handed.

Amazingly, this savage attack was not the end of monasticism on Iona. The monks who had fled returned, buried Blathmac and restored St Columba’s reliquary to its place. Columba’s relics remained at Iona until 849, when they were divided, half going to Kells, the other half being sent to the cathedral of Dunkeld, north of Perth in Scotland. Politics was more important in this decision than security, however (see below), as Iona had not been raided again after Blathmac’s killing. Even then, Iona’s glorious history ensured that some sort of monastic community continued throughout the Viking Age as at least three Scots kings were buried there in the later ninth century; Iona was just too prestigious to be abandoned completely. In this respect, Iona was more fortunate than most other Scottish monasteries, almost all of which were abandoned after repeated Viking attacks. A Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross on Scotland’s east coast is one of the few monasteries of this period that has been systematically excavated. This community thrived in the seventh and eighth centuries as a centre for book production, metalworking, glassworking and sculpture. Overlying all the occupation layers was a layer of soot and charcoal dated to around 800, showing that the monastery was abandoned after suffering a catastrophic fire, almost certainly, given the dating, the result of a Viking attack.

Raiders become settlers

Because of its fame, Viking raids on Iona were recorded in Irish annals but it is more than likely that Vikings were active in Scotland before 795. Almost certainly, the first places in Scotland to be raided by Vikings were in the Northern Isles (the Shetland and Orkney Islands) as they are the natural first landfall for ships sailing west across the North Sea from Norway. Shetland is 250 miles west of Norway, less than two days’ sail in good conditions, and from there it is only 60 miles south to Orkney, from where Viking raiders could choose to sail south down Britain’s east coast, or head west and south to the Hebrides and Ireland. The Vikings who raided Lindisfarne in 793 and Iona in 795 would have sailed via Shetland and Orkney. These routes were probably already well-known to the Norwegians. There is strong archaeological evidence for trade between the Northern Isles and Norway before the Viking Age – combs made of Scandinavian reindeer antler have been found in the high-status Pictish settlement at Birsay in Orkney, for example – so the first Viking raiders knew where they were going.

Within a very short time of their earliest recorded raids in Scotland, Vikings began to seize land in Scotland for settlement. This settlement went unrecorded in contemporary chronicles, no doubt because Viking raids on Scottish monasteries had dispersed or killed the monks who might have written them. In the absence of written sources, the most important source of evidence about its geographical extent are place-names of Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian place-names are most common in the Northern Isles, and Caithness in the far north-east of the Scottish mainland. Almost all place-names here are of Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian place-names are also common throughout the Hebrides and along Scotland’s deeply indented west coast, showing that this area too saw substantial settlement. Scandinavian place-names in all of these areas are overwhelmingly of Norwegian origin, pointing to the origins of most of the Viking settlers. Norwegian place-name elements such as
–sta
ðir, as found in Grimista (‘Grim’s place’), and
–bolstaðr,
as in Isbister (‘eastern farm’), are especially common in the Northern Isles. Other common elements found in the Northern Isles, the Hebrides and along the west coast include
fjall
, as in Askival (‘ash mountain’);
fjord
, as in Laxford (‘salmon fjord’);
sker
, as in skerry (i.e. a reef);
dalr
(‘dale’);
vik
, as in Lerwick (‘muddy bay’); and
ø
, an island, as in Sanday (‘sandy island’). Dating these settlements is not easy. It is thought that the Northern Isles were settled very early, possibly as early as 800, while the Hebrides – the Sudreys or ‘South Isles’ to the Vikings – were settled around 825. There were certainly well-established Norse communities in these areas by the second half of the ninth century. Place-names of both Norwegian and Danish origin also show that there was Scandinavian settlement in the Isle of Man and in Galloway and Dumfries in south-west Scotland. The settlements in Dumfries are probably best considered as an extension of the Scandinavian settlements in north-west England, which took place in the early tenth century.

Viking DNA

As might be expected, given their proximity to Norway, the Viking impact was strongest in the Northern Isles. The islands must have looked to Norwegians like attractive places to settle. The environment is similar to western Norway’s so settlers could easily transplant their traditional pastoral-farming way of life. The Shetland Islands are predominantly covered with peat moors and rough pasture, but the Orkney Islands, though windswept and treeless, have large areas of good arable land, which was in short supply in Norway. The islands also had the advantages of good communications, being located not too far from the support of family and also providing good bases for Viking raids further south. The isolated Pictish communities there stood no chance of organising a co-ordinated defence against Viking raiders and they would have been overwhelmed quickly and easily. At least some of the native Picts had something more than land to seize as a major hoard of eighth-century silver jewellery, sword fittings and drinking bowls found buried near a ruined Pictish monastery on St Ninian’s Isle in Shetland shows. The date of this hoard makes it likely that it was buried to hide it from Viking raiders. That such a valuable hoard was not recovered suggests its owner came to a bad end.

The Northern Isles were unique in the history of Scandinavian settlement in the Viking Age. In all areas which Scandinavians settled in this period that already had an indigenous population, the fate of the settlers was, ultimately, to be assimilated into the local population in around three generations. This is what happened in England and Normandy. However, the Northern Isles developed into an enduring extension of the Scandinavian world, becoming completely Norse in culture and language. Until recently it was thought that this was because the Vikings had actually slaughtered or expelled most of the Pictish population. The Viking settlement certainly seems to mark a clear break in the islands’ history. No Pictish place-names survive (a few Norse place-names may have Pictish roots, but this is disputed), no Pictish settlements show evidence of continuing occupation after
c.
800, though some, as at the Brough of Birsay, were later built over by Norse settlements. Very few Pictish artefacts have ever been found in Norse settlements, indicating that there was little interaction between settlers and locals. It might appear that the Picts disappeared without trace. Thanks to the new science of DNA profiling, the genes of the modern population of the Northern Isles tell a subtler story. Analysis of the male population’s Y chromosomes, which are passed only through the male line from father to son, showed that 44 per cent of men in Shetland and 33 per cent of men in Orkney carry a distinctive genetic marker called the M17 haplotype, which is also carried by a majority of Norwegian and Swedish (but not Danish) men. Factoring out post-medieval immigration, this indicates that more than half the male population of the isles in the Viking Age was of Scandinavian origin. Studies of mitochondrial DNA, passed only through the female line, found that the same proportion of women in Shetland and Orkney have Scandinavian ancestry. This indicates that the settlers came as family groups, a sign that they felt secure and unthreatened by native resistance. What happened to the Picts? The process of conquest must have thinned their numbers in various ways, some were killed in battle, others took their boats and fled, and many more would have been rounded up for the slave trade and sold off the islands. The outnumbered survivors, reduced to a servile condition, were soon assimilated by the Norse.